An Important Announcement
October 1, 2024
Dear Friend,
I am thrilled to introduce poet and essayist Molly McCully Brown as Image’s next editor in chief. Molly stood out in a field of impressive applicants brimming with literary prowess, leadership ability, and ideas to build on Image’s storied past and shape our future.
Longtime readers may remember Molly’s remarkable essay in issue 88, “Bent Body, Lamb.” Her writing has been described as “revelatory” (Ada Limón) and “dazzling…beautiful, urgent” (Ilya Kaminksy) and praised for its “lyric compression and expansive grace” (Jamie Quatro). To get to know Molly more, check out her conversation with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.
Molly impressed us with her energy and enthusiasm, her keen literary intelligence, and her observations about the journal, both at the intellectual level—an appreciation for our commitment to honoring formal structure and thoughtful reflection—and the emotional level, including an observation that Image tends to be “determinedly cerebral…but all faith doesn’t occur in the head.”
In our conversations, Molly emphasized ways Image can live more fully into our mission by providing more access points to our organization. She shares our aspiration to provide new doorways into our work for many people and communities who do not yet know Image exists.
Molly will lead an editorial staff that has worked together for five years—including Shane McCrae, Melissa Pritchard, Nick Ripatrazone, Aaron Rosen, Lauren Winner, and Mary Mitchell. While readers may meet new faces in our interviews and content and note more explicit connections between our sections, you can also expect to continue seeing familiar contributors and themes.
Our choice of Molly, a poet and essayist, is an expression of our commitment to not just speaking about the arts, but speaking in the language of the arts. We hope you will enjoy the first of her editorial statements. Originally commissioned as a guest editorial before we posted the job, it’s now a providential introduction to our new editor in chief.
Please join us in welcoming Molly McCully Brown to Image.
Sara Arrigoni
Publisher & Executive Director
sarrigoni@imagejournal.org
Dear Friend,
Image has been a home for my work for almost a decade now, a space in which I’ve been honored to be a teacher, a collaborator, and—first and most fundamentally—a profoundly grateful reader. From the moment I encountered the journal as a college student simultaneously hunting for faith, railing against it, and trying to figure out how to live with and inside it, Image has been a community, both on and off the page, that continually reawakens me to the world around me and all the infinite and infinitesimal ways mystery is at work inside it. Each time I leave an encounter with Image, I’m less certain than I was before—of my own correctness and centrality, of my angers and wounds, of my biases and assumptions—but in the space that certainty once occupied, I always find grace.
Where I live, in the high desert of Wyoming, the leaves on the birches and aspens have changed from green into a shock of yellow, and we’ve started waking up to hints of frost. It’s a season of change in more ways than one, a moment when our world feels like it’s at a critical tipping point. It would be easy in such a moment for conviction to calcify into something impenetrable and unnuanced, for belief to become a blunt, expedient instrument rather than an engine of connection, and for disagreement and difference in interpretation to curtail conversation rather than engender it. Often, awe, faith, and joy feel fundamentally incompatible with grief, uncertainty, fear, and pain. In Image’s pages though, these things have always coexisted and informed one another, creating resonance and connection where one least expects it.
Art is a critical part of the way we collectively steward and shape our world, unfathomable as it can sometimes feel, and there’s never been a more crucial time for Image’s rigorous, inclusive, delicate, and determinedly multifaith commitment to cultivating space for devotion, wonder, and religion in the literary landscape. My own work as a writer, teacher, and editor has been indelibly shaped by Image, and I’m honored to serve as the journal’s editor in chief for the next three years.
I hope this will be an era that builds on Image’s extraordinary history to broaden our range of contributors and the shapes of the stories we tell, and to cultivate an even greater array of opportunities for dialogue, community-building, and collective encounters with the mystery and majesty of our world.
Every genuine conversation begins with listening, and that’s the way I’d like to begin my tenure as editor: listening to Image’s incredible staff and our remarkable section editors as we shape the next chapter together; and listening to all of you, our beloved friends and readers, about what you’d like to see as we forge ahead. Please reach out to me if you’d like to be in touch; I can’t wait to hear from you.
Molly McCully Brown
Editor in Chief
mmccullybrown@imagejournal.org
About Molly McCully Brown
Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020) and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, Tin House, The Yale Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. The recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, she is director of creative writing at the University of Wyoming and the editor in chief of Image Journal.
“Image shows the seriousness of the language of faith in keeping the human world large and difficult and interesting.”
—Rowan Williams, poet and theologian
Every quarter Image curates 128 pages of fiction, essays, poetry, and visual art that explore religious faith and spiritual questions. While our focus is on contemporary work, much of what we publish draws on the deep wells of ancient traditions. Anchored in historic faith, Image invites any artist sincerely wrestling with the questions that faith awakens.
As our mission statement says, our Christian faith doesn’t paint us into a corner but rather gives us a palette for audacious artistry. We have room for quiet reverence, for the contemplative mode. We have room for humor. We have room for the formal and for the experimental. For figuration and abstraction. For long reads and flash fiction. For bronze sculpture and video art, for oil painting and graffiti. While we reject didactic and polemical art, we have room for anguish, rage, and thirst for justice. We have room for muddle and mess. We have room for wonder and awe. In each age, this needs to happen in new ways, which is why our focus is on contemporary work.
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